Bourgeois Right

RESTORATION of CAPITALISM in the USSR

The Soviet Union of the mid-1930s was predominantly a scene of triumph and unity. 

Its elementary features were that state power was solidly in the hands of the working class; the major opposition blocs within the party had been exposed and defeated and the unity of the party was strong; the alliance between the working class and the peasantry had been cemented by the collectivization of agriculture; the foundations of socialist economy had been laid; and gigantic forward strides were being made on this basis. 

It was this triumphant spirit that animated the party's 17th Congress of 1934, inspired the adoption of the historic Soviet constitution of 1936 and provided the context for extensive measures of democratization in the Soviet government apparatus in 1937 and the strengthening of democracy and centralism in the party at the 18th Congress in 1939. 

There was nothing phony or hollow at the basis of the predominant spirit of the time. The victories in the area of political. cconomic, social and cultural construction achieved by the Soviet power were as real and tangible as the victories being achieved in our own day by the national liberation struggles of the peoples of Indochina. There was and is no legitimate ground for a cynical or pessimistic attitude regarding them. 

And yet, some 20 years after the landmark adoption of the 1936 Soviet constitution, the elementary features of Soviet society had undergone a complete change of character. State power came into the hands of a bourgeois class; the party changed nature; the worker-peasant alliance came under attack; the foundations of the socialist economy were put to the sledgehammer and wrecking ball; and the bottom began falling out from under the forward strides in the development of social production. 

To understand that the USSR was once socialist is not difficult in itself. Nor is it so difficult to see, as will be shown, that it is today capitalist. Not so easy, however, is to grasp these two opposite and contradictory states in their interconnectedness and as a process, to see the seeds of the later in the earlier and to mark the point where an accumulation of gradual, insignificant quantitative changes produced an abrupt turnabout in the whole character of the society. 

In this connection, a highly important contribution has recently appeared in the Chinese theoretical journal Red Flag. Although it addresses itself mainly to current questions in the Communist party of China, it has direct and clear reference also to the ongoing discussions among Marxist-Leninists everywhere about the transformations that took place in the Soviet Union. Entitled "On the Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique," by Yao Wen-yuan, the article is a critique of shallow, idealist or vulgar interpretations of the Soviet capitalist restoration and deserves lengthy quotation in the context of the present study. 

"It is rather clear," writes Yao, a veteran Communist and a leader in the cultural revolution, "that the Lin Piao and antiparty clique represented the interests of the overthrown landlord and bourgeois classes and the desire of the overthrown reactionaries to topple the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. 

"The Lin Piao antiparty clique opposed the great proletarian cultural revolution and had inveterate hatred for the socialist system under the dictatorship of the proletariat in our country, slandering it as 'feudal autocracy'. . . ." 

Khrushchev, it will be recalled, upon taking command of the Soviet Communist party in 1956 engaged in similar name-calling against the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR under Stalin. 

Yao then goes on to recall the intraparty machinations and intrigues of the Lin Piao faction which culminated in "Project 571," an attempt at a military coup, which failed and cost its author his life during his hasty flight to escape to the USSR in 1971. "All this reflects the life-and-death struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the two major antagonistic classes, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a struggle that will go on for a long period. 

"So long as the overthrown reactionary classes still exist, the possibility remains for the emergence within the party (and in society as well) of representatives of the bourgeoisie who will try to turn their hope for restoration into attempts at restoration. Therefore we must raise our vigilance, guard against and smash every plot by reactionaries at home and abroad and not permit our vigilance to slacken." 

Thus far Yao's article moves on familiar ground. It begins to dig deeper, however, with the following: 

"But seeing this much," -- that is, seeing that the remnants of the old bourgeoisie present a danger -- "is still not grasping the whole issue. 

"The Lin Piao antiparty clique represented the hope not only of the overthrown landlords and bourgeoisie for restoration but [also] of the newly engendered bourgeois elements in socialist society for usurping power. They themselves had some characteristics of the newly engendered bourgeois elements and a number of them were in fact such elements. And certain of their slogans met and reflected the needs in developing capitalism of the bourgeois elements and those who want to take the capitalist road. It is precisely this aspect of the question that merits further analysis. 

"Chairman Mao points out: "Lenin said, 'small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie 

continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale.' This also occurs among a section of the workers and a section of the party members. Both within the ranks of the proletariat and among the personnel of state organs there are people who follow the bourgeois style of life." 

"The existence of bourgeois influence and the influence of international imperialism and revisionism are the political and ideological source of new bourgeois elements, while the existence of bourgeois right provides the vital economic basis for their emergence." 

The term "bourgeois right" is taken from Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program," and refers to relationships that are free and equal in form, but unfree and unequal in substance. Thus "from each according to his ability, to each according to the amount of labor performed" is a relationship of apparent equality but in reality generates inequality because different individuals perform different amounts of labor. Similarly, the motto "last hired, first fired," which underlies the capitalist trade union seniority system, promotes a formal fairness and equality of opportunity; but also in substance reinforces and reproduces discrimination and inequality in hiring. 

Yao then quotes both Lenin and Mao Tsetung regarding the survival of bourgeois relations in portions of the economic basis of socialist society. (See the fifth article in this series.) It is the accent on the economic basis that is crucial here; for it would be idealist to suppose that a new bourgeoisie can be generated within socialist society solely on the basis of old ideas surviving in people's minds. People's consciousness, Marx held, is a reflection of their social being. This remains true in socialist society as well. If bourgeois ideas not only survive but reproduce and take new forms in socialist society, this is because there is a basis for them in social being. The program advanced by the Lin Piao clique, Yao writes, "neither dropped from the skies nor was it innate in the minds of those who claimed to be 'supergeniuses'; it was a reflection of social being." 

"The analyses made both by Lenin and Chairman Mao tell us that bourgeois right which is bound to exist as regards distribution and exchange under the socialist system should be restricted under the dictatorship of the proletariat so that in the long course of the socialist revolution the three major differences between workers and peasants, between town and country and between manual and mental labor will gradually be narrowed and the discrepancies between [wage] grades will be narrowed and the material and ideological conditions for closing such gaps will gradually be created." 

If the opposite is done. Yao says, "the inevitable result will be polarization, i.e., a small number of people will in the course of distribution acquire increasing amounts of commodities and money through certain legal channels and numerous illegal ones; capitalist ideas of amassing fortunes and craving for personal fame and gain, stimulated by such 'material incentives,' will spread unchecked; public property will be turned into private property and speculation, graft and corruption, theft and bribery will rise; the capitalist principle of the exchange of commodities will make its way into political life and even into party life, undermine the socialist planned economy and give rise to such acts of capitalist exploitation as the conversion of commodities and money into capital and labor power into a commodity; there will be a change in the nature of the system of ownership in certain department and units which follow the revisionist line; and instances of the oppression and exploitation of the laboring people will once again occur. 

"As a result, a small number of new bourgeois elements and upstarts who have totally betrayed the proletariat and the laboring people will emerge among party members, workers, well-to-do peasants and personnel in state organs. 

"Our worker comrades have put it well: 'if bourgeois right is not restricted, it will hold back the development of socialism and aid the growth of capitalism.' 

"When the economic strength of the bourgeoisie grows to a certain extent. its agents will demand political rule, the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the socialist system and a complete change of socialist ownership, and openly restore and develop the capitalist system . . . . " 

Yao also takes note of the particularities entailed in a restoration attempt by newly engendered bourgeois elements, as distinct from remnants of the old bourgeoisie: 

"The new bourgeois elements who arise as a result of erosion by bourgeois ideas and the existence of bourgeois right generally share the political features of double-dealers and upstarts. In order to carry out capitalist activities under the dictatorship of the proletariat, they always put up a certain socialist signboard; since their restorationist activities aim not at snatching back any means of production of which they have been dispossessed but at seizing the means of production they have never possessed, they are especially greedy, anxious to swallow at one gulp the wealth belonging to the whole people or to the collective and place it under their private ownership." 

In order to avoid such a restoration, Yao concludes, it is necessary in practice to "dig away the soil breeding the bourgeoisie and capitalism," and, in consciousness, "to be able in good time to see through the new bourgeoisie . . . as it appears or is taking shape." 

There in a nutshell Yao has put the cardinal mistake made by the Soviet Communist party during the period when Stalin was its leader. They did not dig away fast enough the political-economic-social "soil" that was engendering a new bourgeoisie and did not perceive the danger it posed until the initiative had already slipped out of their hands. A closer look at these problems is in order. 

8 Old Soil

The gradual emergence and maturing of a potential new bourgeoisie within the fold of Soviet socialist society was a silent and largely secret process that can be sketched today only in the barest outlines. 

There is some sketchy data available to indicate the common economic situation, the material foundation, by which the bourgeoisie that later took power was engendered. But the process by which it gradually organized itself as a class, shaped its own associations and acquired collective self-consciousness prior to its bid for power are almost entirely unknown. 

And necessarily so. For the potential bourgeoisie had to emerge under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any open association for or intentional advocacy of capitalist aims was impossible. A highly efficient secret police made even conspiracy -- historically a favorite mode of bourgeois organization -- dangerous in the extreme. It is unlikely that future historians will unearth any reliable documentary record of what passed through the minds of the nascent Soviet bourgeoisie while it was a suppressed class. The content of its secret ideas and of its whispered conversations can only be deduced ex post facto: from the content, for example, of Khrushchev's 1956 "secret" speech and above all from the character of the measures taken after the accession to power. 

What the record does show fairly clearly is that the "remnants" of the old society -- the pre-1917 bourgeoisie and the NEPmen and kulaks pushed out in the late 1920s and early 1930s -- played no leading role in the transformations that took place after the death of Stalin in 1953. Biologically many of these individuals, insofar as they remained in the country, were still young and vigorous enough in the mid-1950s to have played a political role. But conditions under the dictatorship of the proletariat were heavily stacked against this possibility. A bourgeois origin was a handicap in gaining party membership and a virtually absolute disqualifier for party leadership. 

The U.S. financial oligarch and diplomat W. Averell Harriman makes this point ironically in a book recounting his journey to the USSR in 1959 ("Peace With Russia?" New York, 1959, p.17), where he met with the party and government leadership. Harriman quotes Khrushchev: 

"'I was a humble worker myself,' he said. 'I started life as a shepherd, was promoted to a cowherd and eventually got a job in the mines, where I stayed till the Revolution.' 

"As though not to be outdone," Harriman continues the anecdote, "Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, who with Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had joined the discussion, broke in: 'And I was the son of a shoemaker.' Kozlov said, 'And I was a homeless waif.' Even Gromyko, who had sat in glum silence throughout the conversation, spoke up: 'And I was the son of a pauper.' I told them they all sounded like American politicians on the stump boasting of the log-cabin origins. . . ." 

The seizure of power after Stalin, in short, was not the restoration of the old expropriated bourgeoisie. It was the rise of a new bourgeoisie engendered within socialism under the proletarian dictatorship. But where and how was this bourgeoisie engendered? 

The classically recognized breeding ground of capitalists under socialism is in agriculture, particularly in the collective farms. Though the Soviet collective farms were no longer characterized by that small-scale production which Lenin had noted "engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale," there was still enough of this ground to constitute a danger. 

It was not only the private household plots. More problematic was the form of collective-farm property itself. It was socialist property, in the sense that the proletarian state owned the entire land as well as the major agricultural machinery (tractors, combines and the like) used by the collective farmers. But apart from these primary and some secondary restrictions (such as price controls), each collective farm operated relative to the others and relative to the state much as a private profit-making enterprise. However many thousands of persons might be combined in a single collective farm, each such farm still constituted production of a relatively petty and anarchic kind compared to the scale and the planful integration of production in the state sector, particularly industry. 

In Stalin's last published writing, "Economic Problems of Socialism" (1952), there are clear warnings regarding the collective farms and about the commodity-exchange relations involved in this form. "It would be unpardonable blindness not to see at the same time," Stalin writes, "that these factors are already beginning to hamper the powerful development of our productive forces, since they create obstacles to the full extension of government planning to the whole of the national economy, especially agriculture. There is no doubt that these factors will hamper the continued growth of the productive forces of our country more and more as time goes on. The task, therefore, is to eliminate these contradictions by gradually converting collective-farm property into public property, and by introducing -- also gradually -- products-exchange in place of commodity circulation." (Peking, Foreign Languages Press ed., p. 70). 

We know from subsequent events that the bourgeois elements within the USSR and its communist party did not agree with this estimate of Stalin's. Nor did they agree with his strict injunction (in the same work) against the idea of selling off the machines and tractors to the collective farms, a proposal that was bound to lead, Stalin wrote, "to the regeneration of capitalism." (p. 96) (A few years afterward Khrushchev implemented precisely this proposal among others which Stalin had criticized in this work.) It is significant, however, that neither Khrushchev nor any other high party official came out at the time in favor of the proposal, which had been put forward in letters to Stalin by two obscure individuals named Sanina and Venzher. A public discussion of Stalin's book was organized and the entire party was directed to participate but if Khrushchev already in 1952 agreed with Sanina and Venzher and their like, he kept it secret. In public he and his allies agreed with Stalin's ideas enthusiastically -- and a short time later did the opposite. Such methods were characteristic of the ascendant Soviet bourgeoisie. 

Despite the tremendous importance of developments in agriculture during and after the Soviet socialist period however, the leading forces behind the events of the mid-1950s came not only from this sector, the most obvious and well-recognized seedbed of capitalism. Agriculture had been Khrushchev's main speciality. But others of the leading neobourgeois forces that took power after Stalin's death had party careers that involved them rather more heavily in the affairs of engineering and industry. 

The position of Soviet engineering and management personnel, particularly that of enterprise directors, was a sharply contradictory one during the socialist period. They had great responsibilities, greater even than those of managers in capitalist society, but vitally fewer powers than their capitalist counterparts. 

The Soviet enterprise director (or plant director) under socialism was held personally responsible and accountable for the organization of the production process in its human, technical and bookkeeping dimensions. Responsibility was concentrated in the individual, in accordance with the principle of "one-man management" advocated in the early 1920s by Lenin along with the other measures that made up the first stage of NEP. It was a principle designed to overcome the confusion, evasion of responsibility and production breakdowns that were all too frequent in the early period of spontaneous factory seizures and primitive workers' "self-management" and it was preserved and even to a certain extent reinforced in the period of planned economy. The director's responsibility under the system was in fact even heavier than that of a plant manager under capitalism, because the Soviet director was bound both technically and legally by the economic plan which prescribed in considerable detail what was to be produced and when. As Stalin emphasized in a speech at the 15th Party Congress in 1927, "Our plans are not forecast plans, not guesswork plans, but directive plans, which are binding upon our leading bodies. . . ." (Works, Vol. 10 p. 335). This meant that a director who failed to fulfill the plan was violating the law, could be brought before a court and if found guilty of conscious misdoing, sentenced to death as a saboteur. 

At the same time as they were charged with heavy and strict responsibilities, the Soviet managers as a rule had considerably less power than their capitalist counterparts over the workers. They did have strong authority, particularly during the great influx of peasants in the industrialization drive of the early 1930s, to assign workers to different roles in the internal division of labor, to punish lateness and absenteeism with fines and otherwise to "run the shop" -- though even this authority could be challenged successfully. But they did not have the most vital of the powers possessed by their capitalist counterparts, namely the power to fire a worker at will. They could not threaten a worker with unemployment and hunger. 

This was a concrete meaning of the phrase that labor power in the USSR was no longer a commodity bought and sold like any other: its price (wages) was no longer depressed by the existence of a relative surplus army of unemployed and the inalienable right of commodity buyers to refuse to buy -- the right to not hire and to lay off -- was no longer recognized. Except during wartime, workers were free to quit; but managers could not fire them except by proving some criminal offense against them. Thus, lacking the whip hand, the managers were weak. 

Moreover, the workers had more than one channel by which to get at directors who abused such authority as they had. As the British bourgeois scholar Mary McAuley writes (in "Labour Disputes in the Soviet Union," Oxford 1969), there were special courts to hear industrial disputes to which only workers had access; managerial personnel could appear there only as defendants and were barred from initiating cases (pp. 54-55). Even before matters came to court, there were ways that the workers on the shop floor could let a troublesome director know who was boss. One of these avenues, the production meeting, is described by the bourgeois scholar David Granick in his book, "The Red Executive": 

"Management is operating under severe ideological and practical handicaps in its efforts to keep down worker criticism. One factory director . . . implied that production meetings were a real ordeal for him. But at a question as to whether workers dared to criticize openly, he said, 'Any director who suppressed criticism would be severely punished. He would not only be removed, he would be tried.'" (New York, 1960, p. 230) 

The combination of enormous responsibility but relatively little power in the hands of the enterprise directors was not in the long run a healthy one. The way forward would have been progressively to transfer more and more of the directors' responsibilities to the workers themselves, to match their power. But as the party's policy on the question remained basically static, the directors seized the initiative themselves. On the one hand they arrogated to themselves more of the powers held by the workers, and at the same time chipped away at the responsibilities imposed on them by the plan. Both these tendencies on the directors' part, stemming from an identical capitalist impulse, were kept in check and suppressed during Stalin's lifetime. But their source was not eradicated. After his death, once the new leadership had consolidated its grip on the party, the directors' suppressed complaints at their powerlessness and at the onerous burden of the plan were given free play in the press and the demands implicit in these complaints were given full satisfaction.

9 In the Balance

From the end of World War 2 to the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Communist party and government appeared outwardly strong and unshakable as never before. Behind the solid exterior, however, there were processes in motion that allowed this bastion of socialism -- the embodiment at the time of everything Marxism-Leninism stood for -- to be taken over rather painlessly, as historical changes go, by a group of leaders with an anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist counterrevolutionary program. 

The task is to understand how such a turnabout was possible. It is a very difficult task. There are few models for the mind to lean on. Most of the key documents that would shed light on particular events are not available. Much was done in secrecy. Nevertheless, by looking at developments in broad outline, it is possible to identify four main causes that brought about this historic reversal. 

The first of these has already been touched on earlier, namely the reflection, up in the highest circles of the party and the government, of the vestiges of bourgeois relations of production that existed within socialist society at the base. In the structure of the collective farms, as was pointed out, there remained a certain objective basis for the narrow, self-centered, profiteering and anarchic behavior that is a mark of capitalism. At the point of production in industry, likewise, an excessive concentration of responsibilities in the hands of individual directors and engineers engendered among the latter some feelings of superiority and a desire to gather power into their hands as well. In both these main branches of social production, the leading people at the base necessarily operated with one toe, or even one foot, on capitalist or semi-capitalist ground. The aspiration of moving further in that direction, rather than toward communism, could not but arise in their heads in one or another form. While in the minds of most this notion -- at least in its most obvious dress -- was undoubtedly quickly repressed, it was to be expected that such ideas in disguise would exert a significant influence over many, and become the altogether dominant impulse in the heads of a few. 

All this is inevitable in any socialist society -- society as it emerges out of capitalism, carrying with it not only many of the old ideas but also some of the old soil. Even the working class is bound to be touched in its consciousness by the survivals under socialism of what Marx called "bourgeois right"; for the inequalities of the wage scale, supplemented too often in the USSR by individual bonuses and premiums, must have worked counter to the brilliant spirit of collective enthusiasm and the new attitude toward labor which the Soviet working class displayed par excellence. 

It is equally inevitable that such remnants of capitalist relationships of production at the base of socialist society will percolate up into the higher levels of party and government, as well as other institutions. It is part of the work of the higher levels to keep in the closest possible touch with conditions below. In the countless meetings, visits and conferences where Soviet cadre of different levels daily rubbed elbows, the backward aspects of reality and thought at the base were bound to be transmitted upward along with the progressive ones. The collective farm manager whose underlying motives were not much different from those of a kulak, the factory director who thirsted to hold the whip hand over the workers, the engineer who developed delusions of genius, the lower-level party cadre who wanted privileges -- all were bound to find or to shape, sooner or later, a sympathetic ear on the higher levels, a leader who knew both how to conceal and to advance their interests. Con-men, careerists and, ultimately wreckers such as Khrushchev, turned out to be the natural products of the shady side of socialist society, just as the great builders of socialism, leaders of the working class and teachers of Marxism-Leninism such as Stalin were the natural products of the bright socialist mainstream. 

The presence of two-faced, careerist and opportunist individuals in high party and government circles in the USSR was an historically inevitable and constantly recurring condition. So long as society remains in the socialist stage of development such persons will be climbing or trying to climb up the ladder, just as they do in communist parties in capitalist society. The exposure and ouster of one or two of them does not discourage the others, it only teaches them to be more clever. This was the first reason why a bourgeois takeover was possible in the USSR. 

In addition to this more or less constant condition, there was in the Soviet Union during this particular period an historically temporary condition, compounded both of objective and subjective elements, which made the work of the rotten apples in the party barrel easier and tilted the scales of chance in their favor. 

The Soviet party and government by the late 1940s and early 1950s had achieved an unprecedentedly strong and triumphant position externally and internally. Having stood off, driven back and smashed the German fascist invasion during the war, the USSR found itself by 1950 no longer an isolated socialist state but the center of a camp of socialist countries embracing the bulk of the Eurasian land mass with about a third of the world's population. 

Internally, there was a rapid reconversion and reconstruction of the war-ravaged economy, a technological modernization and expansion that led to significant production advances over the prewar standard relatively short time, all without the spasms of unemployment that marked the postwar reconversion in the capitalist countries. Though there was still much to be done, the Soviet party and government had cause to celebrate. Their achievements were spectacular. 

This historical conjuncture, however, inevitably gave rise to a certain mood of self-satisfaction among many of the leading cadre who had been involved in the victories. There was a feeling among entirely honest and dedicated cadre that they could now retire on their laurels while remaining at their posts. A penetrating description of this development during the last years under Stalin was published in 1968 by the Albanian party newspaper Zeri i Popullit: 

"The members of the Bolshevik party, who were led to legendary battles by Lenin and Stalin, were cadres of a class origin and with revolutionary vigor, tempered in revolution, in struggles, in the building of socialism, in battles against Trotskyism, against deviators and other traitors. They were ideologically and politically tempered and had a firm and legitimate confidence in their glorious Bolshevik party, in Lenin and Stalin, in the correct line and norms that they had mapped out. 

"To them the party was everything, it was their heart, brain and eyes, that is why they defended it, were educated by it and by their great leader. But while trying to carry out the party's and Stalin's correct line and norms the Soviet cadres, at first not all of them and not in a clear-cut way but gradually, became susceptible to a feeling of stability which is alien, in the revolutionary sense, to development. . . . Successes at work nourished the feeling of self-complacency and, parallel with these successes, the Soviet cadres began to lose their proletarian simplicity, raised unjust claims, which they considered 'politically legitimate' because these people had worked and fought. With their rise to responsibility there was taking shape in them the feeling of ease and complacency and they were ever more infected by bureaucratism, intellectualism and technocratism. . . . Many cadres no longer listened, as they had done previously, to the voice of the masses. Among them the thought began to prevail that they knew everything themselves, that they were specialists in everything, that they stood above the masses, above the working class politically and ideologically and were more farsighted than the latter. The authority and prestige which the Bolshevik party and Stalin enjoyed among the masses of the Soviet people and in the working class were confounded by these cadres with their personal authority and prestige. All these antiproletarian features deformed the revolutionary concepts among these cadres. As this also infected the party line and its implementation, the revolutionary norms of the party remained formal, the life of the party itself and its organization as well as the whole Soviet state administration were in the process of becoming sclerotic. . . ." (The Party of Labor of Albania in Battle with Modern Revisionism, Tirana 1972, pp. 419-421.) 

In short, the problems within the Soviet party were larger than the presence of a few opportunists. There was a dulling of the fine edge of revolutionary vigilance which would have uncovered the opportunists and caused their downfall. Sincere and dedicated proletarian cadre failed to unmask the bourgeois elements among them, and even united with them to a certain extent, because they themselves had become infected with bourgeois moods. 

These two conditions alone, however, one more or less constant and the other due to temporary historical events, could not by themselves have ensured a revisionist takeover had it not been for a serious political and theoretical error committed by the party leadership, headed by Stalin, nearly two decades before and never corrected. This was the thesis, advanced publicly by Stalin as early as 1936, that the USSR had become "a classless, socialist society." (History of the CPSU, Short Course, New York 1939, p. 329.) Stalin consistently maintained that the USSR ". . . is free of class conflicts. . . ." (Report to the 18th Party Congress, 1939) and that therefore there was no danger, indeed no possibility, of a regeneration of bourgeois forces and of a capitalist restoration from within Soviet society. The danger of restoration came exclusively from the outside via foreign invasion (Letter to Ivanov, New York, 1938). Even in his last published writing, the Economic Problems of Socialism (1952), Stalin corrects himself only to the extent of saying that ". . .even under socialism there will be backward, inert forces that do not recognize the necessity for changing the relations of productions," but still asserts that there can be no real danger because "socialist society . . . does not include the obsolescent classes that might organize resistance. " (Peking 1972, p. 52) 

Because of this basic gap in Stalin's analysis the long series of educational campaigns, cultural purification measures and party-wide theoretical discussions undertaken at his direction after the war could not sufficiently arouse and mobilize the party and the people and shake up the complacent. The campaigns remained to a great extent formal, lifeless exercises because their point was not aimed at the heart of the question. Stalin's theoretical development on this vital point lagged behind the demands of the practical movement and did not give it the revolutionary leadership that was urgently required. This was the third of the major reasons why revisionism could triumph. 

All of this, however, would probably still not have been sufficient to ensure a revisionist victory if there had been among Stalin's closest associates in the party a leader of a stature and ability comparable to Stalin's own. For as long as Stalin himself was alive, the newly engendered bourgeois forces in Soviet society and their incognito representatives in the party and the government dared not take a decisive step. They made progress by inches if at all. They might insinuate their program in minor ways here and there, claim and receive one or another petty privilege that meant nothing and float now and then a tiny, very cautious trial balloon. But there were severe limits. For while Stalin could not or would not recognize the aspiring new bourgeoisie as a class in his theory, this did not prevent him from taking the most vigorous measures against the bourgeois program and its architects in practice. 

Just one example among many cases: In early 1949 the powerful chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), N.A. Voznesensky, undertook apparently on his own hook a modest but significant reorganization of the planning apparatus and an upward revision of prices in the state sector. It was a step along the lines of what Khrushchev did later and had the effect of giving greater scope to commodity-money exchange relations and to the operation of the law of value. Voznesensky did not get far. He was promptly arrested, tried as a saboteur and shot. (See Felker, Soviet Economic Controversies, Cambridge 1966, Kaser, Comecon, 2nd ed. Oxford 1967) And he was not the only one to try similar moves and meet a similar end. 

Of course in the long run this method of restraining the aspirations of the bourgeoisie could not succeed. It was a harmful method when used on a large scale and it was used too often by Stalin and his subordinates when milder measures would have been more productive. But for as long as he was alive, one thing was certain: the newly engendered bourgeoisie and the capitalist-roaders knew beyond a doubt that they were living under the dictatorship of the proletariat. They might have had a certain status and some minor material benefits, they might sun themselves on festival occasions in the party's praise for work well done -- but let them take one step out of line and they were done for. They did not have and could not achieve the most important thing, political power.